HD 4850 reviews sprouting like mushrooms

As AMD has decided to lift the NDA on its HD 4850 card, we can now see first reviews around the net. They all agree on one thing: DAAMIT's HD 4850 wipes the floor with the much more expensive Nvidia 9800GTX.

Our Croatian colleagues from PCEkspert.com have managed to snatch one of those Gigabyte HD 4850 pre-production samples during Computex show and they have posted their review of it now. With a price well under €200, we believe the HD 4850 is going to be a big hit. With the load temperature of 84°C it appears that HD 4850 gets quite warm, but that could be attributed to the fact that PCEkspert.com has the pre-production sample on their hands.

You can also find the preview of the Asus HD 4850 over at PCLabs.pl, and this one also gets to around 80 degrees under load. Of course, you will also need a Google translation, same as with our Croatian colleagues. But both of these reviews agree on one thing, that this is a great product and DAAMIT, they're back.

Ocworkbench.com and Tweaktown.net have tried some HD 4850 Crossfire action, and according to their results, DAAMIT's HD 4850 Crossfire is able to beat Nvidia's dual-chip behemoth, the 9800GX2 and even Zotac's GTX 280 AMP! edition, at least in 3DMark06. OCWorkbench even took the cooler off to show some pictures of the naked HD 4850 card. According to the results at OCWorkbench, the 9800 GX2 scores 16400 in 3DMark06 while the Radeon HD 4850 Crossfire scores 17065. You can check out the OCWorkbench scores here, and Tweaktown's review can be found here.

Guru3D.com guys had a chance to play with the BFG's GTX 280 OC edition. With just a slight factory OC the performance gains are too insignificant to notice, but BFG's OC edition offers other advantages, such as an extensive life-time warranty, HDMI adapter, HDMI cable and a good step-up program. You can check out this Nvidia beast here.

The guys over at Overclockersclub.com have tested the Asus's P45 based, P5Q Deluxe. Priced at around 200 bucks this motherboard has a higher performance than some of the $400+ priced motherboards. The Asus EPU-6 power saving engine will save some penguins and overclocking is as easy as it could be. The early BIOS revision might not be as good as they wanted it to be but it is a matter of time until Asus updates it and makes it a bit better. You can find out here what it takes to get a gold award from these guys.

Techpowerup has taken a closer look at A-DATA's 32GB Compact Flash card which features great random access times, low power requirements and good price per gigabyte. These features makes this card an interesting choice for small form factor PCs, even though that the MLC SSDs are getting cheaper and this ones hard drive performance can't be compared to them.